<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div dir="ltr"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I should also have pointed out I too am influenced by having been a research assistant on the STEDT project back when it started in the mid 1980’s. </span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><div dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Randy </div><div dir="ltr"><br><blockquote type="cite">On Nov 3, 2023, at 19:19, Randy J. LaPolla <randy.lapolla@gmail.com> wrote:<br><br></blockquote></div><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">Hi again Mattis,<div>It should be pointed out for the benefit of the audience that you aren’t exactly an objective observer, having been one of the authors of a competing paper that came out the same year with somewhat different results, using a different database but the same (BEAST) software:</div><div><br></div><div><p style="margin: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-kerning: auto; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-feature-settings: normal; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-variation-settings: normal;">Sagart, Laurent, Guillaume Jacques, Yunfan Lai, Robin J. Ryder, Valentin Thouzeau, <span style="font-style: normal;">Simon J. Greenhill and Johann-Mattis List. 2019. </span><span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-kerning: auto; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-feature-settings: normal; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-variation-settings: normal;">“</span><span style="font-style: normal;">Dated language phylogenies </span><span style="font-style: normal;">shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan</span><span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-kerning: auto; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-feature-settings: normal; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-variation-settings: normal;">”</span><span style="font-style: normal;">, </span><i>Proceedings of the National Academy </i><i>of Sciences </i>116(21). 10317<span style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-kerning: auto; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-feature-settings: normal; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-variation-settings: normal;">–</span>10322. doi:10.1073/pnas.1817972116. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">https://www.</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">pnas.org/content/116/21/10317</span>.</p></div><div><br></div><div>I’ve heard from all of the authors whose papers I reviewed arguments why what they are doing is not lexicostatistics, but it is using counts of supposed cognates to determine language relatedness. That is clearly lexicostatistics, and in my view clearly problematic, as my experience in doing fieldwork is that you cannot say a variety does not have a form (when I worked on Tarung (Dulong), I had a list of supposed lexical differences between three varieties created by another scholar—the same scholar whose lexical list you used in your study, but I did more extensive fieldwork, and found all three varieties had all of the forms—it is like if I ask an American what I am wearing on my lower body, and they say “pants”, whereas if you ask a Brit they may say “trousers”, but that doesn’t mean the Americans don’t have “trousers”, and the Brits don’t have “pants”, but “trousers” is less common in the US and in the case of “pants" in Britain, the meaning is limited to what in the US we call “underpants"), and many of the studies vary in terms of what they count as cognates, as yours did compared to Matisoff’s STEDT. The modern studies seem to be different because somehow using a computer makes them more legitimate.</div><div><br></div><div>Randy<br><div>
<meta charset="UTF-8"><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">——</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">Professor Randy J. LaPolla</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial; font-size: 13.333333015441895px; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">（罗仁地)</span><span style="font-size: 14px;">, PhD FAHA </span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">Center for Language Sciences</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">A302, Muduo Building, #18 Jinfeng Road, Zhuhai City</span><span style="font-size: 14px;">, Guangdong</span><span style="font-size: 14px;">, China</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;"><a href="https://randylapolla.info">https://randylapolla.info</a></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">ORCID ID:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span style="color: rgb(73, 74, 76); background-color: white;"><a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6100-6196">https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6100-6196</a> </span></span> </div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 15px;">邮编：519087</span><br style="font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">广东省珠海市唐家湾镇金凤路18号木铎楼A302</span><br style="font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">北京师范大学珠海校区</span><br style="font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">人文和社会科学高等研究院</span><br style="font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">语言科学研究中心 </span></div></div><div><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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<div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>On 3 Nov 2023, at 6:17 PM, Mattis List <mattis.list@lingulist.de> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">But that is the problem, Randy, that they use an extremely biased sample of the data, and the methods are not made for these samples. It is like arguing that the cake you make must taste good since you used good ingredients, when the problem is the combination of them, the heat you used to cook them, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Btw, I do not believe lexicostatistics was ever falsified. Swadesh is mathematically quite different from modern stochastic methods used in phylogenetic studies. </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">By all means of my knowledge regarding Sino-Tibetan and phylogenetics, I come to the conclusion that Zhang et al.'s study is extremely problematic in so many regards that it should not be taken as an example for solid phylogenetic analyses. </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div id="composer_signature" dir="auto"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">Sent from the road</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div><br></div><div align="left" dir="auto" style="font-size: 100%;"><div>-------- Ursprüngliche Nachricht --------</div><div>Von: "Randy J. LaPolla" <randy.lapolla@gmail.com> </div><div>Datum: 03.11.23 10:52 (GMT+01:00) </div><div>An: Johann-Mattis List <mattis.list@lingulist.de> </div><div>Betreff: Re: [Lingtyp] Greenbergian word order universals: confirmed after all </div><div><br></div></div>Thanks, Mattis,<div>What I was referring to is the reliability of what is determined as cognates in the database. I don’t think a 100 word Swadesh list is sufficient to do anything, and, as I mentioned, lexicostatistics was discredited many years ago. But although Zhang et al. did extract a Swadesh 100 word list of cognates from the 3858 cognate sets (actually 4036 sequenced etyma) in the DB, as the STEDT DB includes semantic changes in the use of the roots, they used cognate sets that included all 949 separate root-meaning (RM) traits. And out of the 506 languages they only selected 109 languages which had at least 90 lexical meanings of the 100 Swadesh-list and were not known for having undergone a lot of language contact influence. If a language had a particular RM out of the set, it would be marked as “1” in the table; if not, it would be given “0”. I’ll attach the part of the supplementary material where they discuss this.</div><div><br></div><div>BTW, Although I agree that Nature publishes stuff that often isn’t very good, my experience with them is that they try hard to get the reviewing right, asking at least three different reviewers with different backgrounds to review the paper, often more than once, and sometimes collaboratively. So it isn’t necessary to find people with both types of expertise (though I can evaluate the non-linguistic side of things—I have been programming computers since 1983), but it is important to have linguists involved who have good knowledge of the languages being talked about. </div><div><br></div><div>Another thing: In doing my reviews (one just last week), I often point out that they need to refer to the linguistic literature and cite it, as their results are not new, and so they should give credit to the linguists who have done the hard work the manual way, and it also is support for their methodology if their results match those of the more empirical studies.</div><div><br></div><div>Randy</div><div><div>
<div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" dir="auto"><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" dir="auto"><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" dir="auto"><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" dir="auto"><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" dir="auto"><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" dir="auto"><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" dir="auto"><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" dir="auto"><div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">——</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">Professor Randy J. LaPolla</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial; font-size: 13.333333015441895px; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">（罗仁地)</span><span style="font-size: 14px;">, PhD FAHA </span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">Center for Language Sciences</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;">A302, Muduo Building, #18 Jinfeng Road, Zhuhai City</span><span style="font-size: 14px;">, Guangdong</span><span style="font-size: 14px;">, China</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;"><a href="https://randylapolla.info/">https://randylapolla.info</a></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">ORCID ID:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span style="color: rgb(73, 74, 76); background-color: white;"><a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6100-6196">https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6100-6196</a> </span></span> </div><div><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 15px;">邮编：519087</span><br style="font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">广东省珠海市唐家湾镇金凤路18号木铎楼A302</span><br style="font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">北京师范大学珠海校区</span><br style="font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">人文和社会科学高等研究院</span><br style="font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">语言科学研究中心 </span></div></div><div><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></blockquote></div><br></div></div></blockquote></div></body></html>